Apple won't be able to break ground on its radical new headquarters this year, as hoped.

The company's new Cupertino, California HQ will sit on a 176 acre campus and features a circular "spacship" main building. Steve Jobs presented the plan to the Cupertino city council in June last year, four months before his death.

Apple hoped to move in in 2015, but a city manager for Cupertino has told media the company was late submitting a slightly revised plan, meaning consent is not likely to be granted until early 2013.

The four-story circular headquarters will be one of the largest buildings in the world.

The revised plans make no major changes to the concept presented by Steve Jobs last year, bar moving the location of a 1000-person auditorium, and adding more carparks. The design now allows for 10,500 parking spots, most underground.

Apple spent $US160 million on the land for its new campus.

The cost of the spaceship building has been estimated at $US500 million (Apple has yet to put a public price tag on the building, instead lumping it in with $US3.4 billion of capex that includes server farms and other projects).

Despite it's recent correction, which has seen the company's stock [NAS:AAPL] fall from an all-time high of $US705.07 over the past few weeks (today it was trading up 0.14% to $561.68), Apple is still the world's most valuable company with a market cap of $US528 billion

The fall in market value - which equates roughly to New Zealand's GDP - has been variously ascribed to iPhone 5 production delays or investors thinking the stock had become over-heated.

It won't solve hunger, world peace but not building it won't either.
What it will do is open eyes to possibilities, employ a heap of people and spread some of the money around.
Can't wait to see it finished.